On the release of his new film Rudo & Cursi, actor, heart-throb and activist
Gael Garcia Bernal explains why Mexico will always be hotter than Hollywood.

No rumble of traffic, no cries from tamale sellers, not even the patter of footsteps. The dawn cacophony had missed its cue and the 20 million Chilangos were staying at home: Mexico City had gone post-apocalyptic. Schools, factories, restaurants, offices — all were shut down. Even Sunday Masses were cancelled, at a time when this staunchly Catholic city perhaps most needed communion with the divine.

In late April, Gael Garcia Bernal was all set to fly to New York for the Tribeca Film Festival, where his latest movie Rudo & Cursi was to get its US premiere, but the outbreak of swine flu meant that he, like everyone else in a metastasising Mexico City, was fearfully holed up at home. ‘At first, it was terrifying, man,’ the actor recalls. ‘I don’t understand epidemics, who does? Paranoia and panic spread through the city incredibly fast. I was just watching news reports of all these people dying and not having any idea when this thing outside my door would end.’

Garcia Bernal ultimately did make it to Tribeca, but for an actor who’s consistently spurned the advances of Hollywood to make movies in Mexico, it seems entirely yet tragically apt that he should spend the darkest days of swine flu among his countrymen. The gringos could wait.

Ever since bursting on to the scene in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s gritty urban drama Amores Perros in 2001, Garcia Bernal has carved out a reputation as one of the mildest-mannered guys in film. Except, that is, where politics is concerned. Aged 16, he joined marches and demonstrations supporting the rebellion of the Zapatista Indians in Chiapas. Aged 24, more famously, when presenting an award at the 2003 Oscars, he ignored the autocue and gave the night’s first denunciation of the Iraq War.

Today, meanwhile, he’s just as politically outspoken about swine flu: with a couple of months’ hindsight, Garcia Bernal has actually come to see the epidemic as a positive. ‘It gave the people of Mexico City time for introspection, for once, which was liberating. Normally the city is caught up in a Western way of operating, which forces you to work all the time, and sacrifice any time you might spend with your family and friends. Those enforced days indoors gave society the chance to reflect on the way we’ve all come to live our lives.’

Such anti-capitalist sentiment would have been worthy of Che Guevara himself, the guerrillero icon who provided Garcia Bernal with his most famous role to date. In 2004’s Motorcycle Diaries, the actor played a young, pre-revolutionary Che as he embarked on a coming-of-age motorbike journey across South America in 1952. Garcia Bernal played the part beautifully, depicting Che’s dawning political conscience in gentle but telling strokes, as he stumbled upon one social injustice after another.

The film premiered at Cannes in 2004 – alongside Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education, in which Garcia Bernal starred as a vengeful drag queen – and on the back of these two hits, the Mexican actor was suddenly cinema’s hottest property. Lucrative Hollywood offers came thick and fast (apparently even for the part of Spartan king Leonidas, in Zack Snyder’s Battle of Thermopylae retelling 300), but Garcia Bernal has to this day refused every single one. Why? Surely he gets offered some parts more meaty and less stereotypical than ‘Chico from the barrio’?

‘Yes, but I’ve never cared for the idea of a career path, or where a film might “take me”. My love is for acting not money, so I only take on roles that I find challenging, in stories I find interesting. I was brought up the Mexican way, where actors are paid very little and every part you take is an act of faith. If people respect that, then great.’

And respect it, they do. The boyish good looks have helped, of course: the doe eyes, sculpted cheekbones and lupine smile – not to mention his compact body (he’s just 5ft 7in) – have made swooning females everywhere sudden converts to Mexican cinema. Previous squeezes include Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley, who admits to ‘going all giggly-teenagery’ over how handsome he was.

Yet Garcia Bernal has always been as much throwback as heart-throb. An art-house pin-up à la Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni, he’s achieved acclaim the world over yet still preserved a conspicuous connection to his homeland – so killer is his gaze, he all but makes the subtitles redundant. Which is no mean feat today, when so much of the old-school cachet has been divested from world cinema.

In London this week to promote his latest film Rudo & Cursi, Garcia Bernal hasn’t fussed too much over his appearance: he sports an overworn Sex Pistols T-shirt and an underwashed pair of denim jeans.

Yet what strikes you most is the sense of warmth and vulnerability about him – two qualities that have helped him make the frequently unsavoury film characters he plays really rather likeable. (Remember his rough-and-ready urchin in Amores Perros who uses his Rottweiler in illegal dogfights to win enough money to run off with his brother’s wife?)

Rudo & Cursi reunites Garcia Bernal with his old mucker and best mate Diego Luna. The two were child stars together in an early-Nineties telenovela, before co-starring in 2001’s marvellous road movie Y tu mama tambien. This time out they play feuding brothers who are whisked away from their jobs at a backwoods banana plantation to become Primera Division football stars in Mexico City.

The lads are ill-equipped to cope with the fame and fortune that come their way – Luna’s character Rudo is distracted by gambling and cocaine, Garcia Bernal’s Cursi by four-by-fours, a vapid television hostess and dreams of pop stardom – and the whole film serves as a satirical swipe on celebrity obsession, which, according to Garcia Bernal, has come to hold modern Mexico lamentably in thrall. ‘We live in an age of spectacle, where celebrity has become a synonym for success. But, like capitalism, celebrity is another poisonous Western idea that has spread itself through our society.’

In many ways, Cursi represents everything that Garcia Bernal could have become, had he given in to the temptations of glitz and glam and not decided to so dutifully follow his artistic muse. (No faded Pistols T-shirts in Cursi’s wardrobe, one would guess.) He says he had ‘great fun with the character’ and messing about with what might have been – especially when performing an über-kitsch, norteño version of Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me, which is Mexico’s most downloaded ringtone in 2009.

A keen footballer himself, Garcia Bernal also enjoyed lording it as a star striker. Acting schedules permitting, he and Luna have played in the same Sunday league team in Mexico City for years, though he admits neither of them is quite the Mexican Maradona. Does this explain why there’s rather little on-field action in the film? ‘No, no, that’s because the story is really a universal one about the rivalry and journey of two brothers. The football’s kind of secondary really.’

This word ‘universal’ is problematic, though. Whisper it softly, but Rudo & Cursi is the first blot on Garcia Bernal’s previously impeccable CV. It’s a clichéd ‘rags to riches and back again’ tale, which could have been made anywhere, and the last-minute-penalty climax is, dare one say it, pure Hollywood.

It’s a far cry indeed from Y tu mama tambien and Amores Perros, which were set against a tantalising backdrop of Mexico on the brink of change, a country plagued by violence and iniquities and all set to eject the corrupt PRI party in 2001, after an uninterrupted 70-year rule. Garcia Bernal and Luna’s characters in Y tu mama were too young, cosseted and sex-obsessed to notice, but director Alfonso Cuarón lingered long on the injustices that pass by outside their car window.

Rudo & Cursi, by contrast, has little to say about contemporary Mexico. The NAFTA-ravaged agricultural sector, mass-migration to Mexico City, and the pre-eminence of drug-lords are all touched on, but ultimately it’s an unchallenging story. And when someone as earnest as Garcia Bernal says he and Luna took on the roles ‘to work with old friends again’ – Alfonso Cuarón here produces, while his brother Carlos (his co-writer on Y tu mama tambien) directs – one immediately fears the worst.

Garcia Bernal, 30, and his long-term partner, Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, have just had their first child together. Now six months old, little Lazaro is about the same age as papa was when he took on his first acting role. Garcia Bernal played baby Jesus in a nativity play, in his home city of Guadalajara, where his thespian parents both used to tread the boards.

Fast forward 18 years, and having turned his back on telenovelas, the Mexican could somewhat curiously be found mixing cement and lugging bricks around a Hackney building site. He had decamped to London, with no plan other than to ‘get lost in Europe for a while’, but he soon caught the acting bug again and enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama, working part-time as a labourer to pay his way. He picked up English fluently but found London life tough: ‘It’s much more closed and harder to discover than Mexico City, which is vibrant, in your face and all there on the streets.’

It was while studying at Central in 1999 that Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu called to ask him if he’d come home and star in Amores Perros. ‘But it was midterm, and I wasn’t allowed to miss any school,’ says Garcia Bernal, smirking mischievously as he recalls his big break. ‘So Alejandro arranged to [send over] a medical certificate saying I needed to return home urgently because I had caught a tropical disease the last time I was in Mexico.’

On the back of Amores Perros and then Y tu mama tambien, Mexico’s biggest-grossing film ever, Mexican cinema was suddenly on the rise again, and in Garcia Bernal had its biggest star since Pedro Infante. After decades in the doldrums, there was even talk of another Epoca de Oro (Golden Age) to match that of the Forties.

Determined that this renaissance should be no flash in the pan, in 2003 Garcia Bernal and Luna set up Canana Films, a production company aimed at telling socially minded stories and ‘documenting what’s truly happening in Mexico today’. Among its first productions was Garcia Bernal’s directorial debut, 2007’s Deficit – the tale of an ill-fated party in Mexico City, marked by racial and class tensions – but its main aim is more grassroots, to support aspiring film-makers across Mexico.

After modest beginnings, Canana is now responsible for 15 releases a year (both feature films and documentaries) and has struck up a deal with Universal Studios’ art-house arm Focus Features for international distribution.

‘I don’t say this to blow my own trumpet, but Canana serves a strong and unique function in Mexico. It produces films by people with something to say, and never for business reasons. And this gives me more than any pay cheque ever could.’ Take that, Hollywood.

Garcia Bernal and Luna have daily catch-ups with the film-makers they’ve commissioned, as well as daily chats with each other about which project to take on next. Throw in his new commitments as a father, and you’d think he can’t have much space in the diary for starring in any new films. Yet rumours persist that Martin Scorsese has tempted the Mexican into co-starring with Daniel Day-Lewis in his new movie Silence – about the persecutions of two Jesuit priests visiting 17th-century Japan – which starts shooting this autumn.

‘It’s a good story, and I hope to be doing it, but at this stage I just don’t know,’ says Garcia Bernal. Rumour has it he’s wary of working with another A-list director, after his acrimonious experience with Almodóvar on Bad Education. The pair clashed repeatedly, Garcia Bernal resenting the lack of actorly freedom the Spanish director allowed him: ‘He’s a director who tells you what to do, and you end up doing it.’

More concrete is the documentary he’s set to make next year about the Bush-conceived wall that’s being built along the US-Mexico border, ostensibly to cut down on drug-running. Some 624 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fencing has already been put up, along what’s roughly a third of the 1,950-mile border, and needless to say, Garcia Bernal isn’t a fan. ‘It was the short-sighted act of the most stupid man ever to be US president.’ He shoots me that famous killer gaze – one worthy of Che Guevara himself.